The European Parliament’s data protection supremo says calls from national leaders to monitor all airline passengers are “playing into terrorists' hands”.
German MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht, who heads the Parliament’s overhaul of EU data protection laws, described the plans for mass storage of PNR (passenger name record) data as …

I'm not one of his supporters, and think that any anti-semitic speech is to be condemned, but surely if you really do support freedom of speech then you shouldn't be able to stop people from being anti-semitic through legal means any more than you should stop any anti-Islamic commentary?

Re: Without even a hint of irony

You're not equating drawing a picture of the prophet Mohammed with saying you feel like killing Jews are you? In the UK the second would be considered hate speech, the first is legally fine. I can understand and agree with this distinction.

Re: Saying we should bomb $MiddleEasternCountry in retaliatiopn

We're discussing the Charlie Hebdo cover, not western foreign policy. I see your point, but not it's relevance.

The OP was talking about freedom of speech and comparing someone saying "I feel like Charlie Coulibaly" (a reference to the hostage taking nutjob in the pattiserie) to a picture of Mohammed saying that he "is Charlie" and all is forgiven. I can see how one of those is considered lawful and one isn't.

Bombing the middle east in retaliation would be mental, but isn't really relevant to the question of whether free speech should be unlimited or not.

Are you saying you think people should be free to say anything, including threatening other people, under free speech laws?

Re: Saying we should bomb $MiddleEasternCountry in retaliatiopn

Wasn't there a famous response by a C19 politician to a Prussian request that Marx and his supporters be arrested for calling for the end of monarchy - "In Britain there is no offense in calling for the death of kings so long as no actual act is planned"

It should be perfectly reasonable to stand up on a street corner and say you want to kill XYZ as long as you aren't actually planning an attack.

Otherwise we have the ridiculous case in UK law where it is legal to defame a religous group but not an ethnic one, and we have a series of legal precedents which declare Jews and Sikhs to be a racial groups and therefore protected but muslims and hindus to be religous groups and therefore not subject to race relations laws.

Or the even more ridiculousness US laws which make some groups a protected minority and others not. So it is an offense to attack gays (protected) but not transgender (not covered in the act)

Re: Saying we should bomb $MiddleEasternCountry in retaliatiopn

In the U.S., publicly saying you wanted to kill a particular person would often constitute assault (depends on the law of the state you are in when you say it). There are of course allowances for saying things like "I'm so angry with (insert name of spouse/significant other/boss) that I could kill him/her". But getting on TV or onstage and saying "I want to kill Mary Johnson, who lives at 123 Main Street" is illegal.

For groups of people, there is no such protection. You can get up onstage and say that "we need to kill every (insert name of racial/ethnic/religious group) in town" and that is legal, as long as you don't start planning that and you don't mind if somewhere north of 95% of people think you're an asshole.

Re: Saying we should bomb $MiddleEasternCountry in retaliatiopn

So nobody else sees any irony in the same government prosecuting a UKIP voter for saying "kill all X" and then dropping some munitions on a wedding party in county X in order to secure votes from UKIP in an upcoming election?

In one case somebody is offended that a racist is racist, in the other some kids get a cluster bomb up them. One is bad, the other isn't.

Re: Saying we should bomb $MiddleEasternCountry in retaliatiopn

"In the UK it is an offence to make a threat to kill someone if you intend the victim to believe that you intend to carry out the threat whether you intend to or not."

Which - while commendable in its intent - is exactly the kind of thing that has zero business being in a piece of legislation: it makes YOU punishable for something outside your control. While straight up seriously threatening someone with bodily harm is obviously not something you should get away with, this leaves arbitrary scope for a third party to maliciously decide to "feel credibly threatened" by something you did whether or not you actually meant to threaten anyone (or indeed have any idea that such interpretation of whatever you did would be possible).

Re: Saying we should bomb $MiddleEasternCountry in retaliatiopn

@sabroni: including threatening other people

That seems exactly the threshold to me.

I think one cannot be prosecuted for being an Anti-Semite, an Islamophob, a racist in general, or a Catholic-hater, not even for expressing one's views, deplorable and unpalatable as they may be, in the town square, or even for acting on them. If one does not wish to, say, employ Jews, Muslims, Catholics, blacks (NB: in general, not just African-Americans - is there a generic PC term?), or bicycle-riders, or if one never enters a kosher or halal shop, the rest of us may decide to never speak to the bigot, never give him any business, and/or cross the street when he walks on a pavement, but I don't think it should be a criminal offence in itself. Large portions of the society may feel offended, but offending someone should not be a crime. Almost any non-trivial statement is likely to offend someone. "Bacon is delicious" will probably offend people in certain neighbourhoods, but you should not be beaten up for blurting it out. You should be allowed to like pork, despise Mohammed, think that a black person should never be allowed to become the president of your country, and be offended that so many people won't speak to you because of the views you hold.

The moment one says "I support killing|beating up|mutilating|torturing|(use your ingenuity here) Jews|Muslims|Catholics|blacks|BMW driver|people who mock the Prophet|people who disagree with me", especially if one is a public figure, the situation changes.

Re: Without even a hint of irony

@YAAC: "Saying we should bomb $MiddleEasternCountry in retaliation and somebody feels like killing $EthnicGroup would seem rather similar."

I would argue that they would not, unless the policy is to bomb a country specifically and solely for being different from yours. If one's country is attacked or seriously threatened by another country (militarily - a terrorist attack by one's own citizens or foreigners does not count, at least as long as it was not meaningfully supported by a foreign government, in which case it may arguably be considered a military act) I would argue that waging a war is a option that should be on the table around which the decision-makers gather. It should not be considered lightly, but it should not be ruled out a priori, either.

Re: Without even a hint of irony @sabroni

You're not equating drawing a picture of the prophet Mohammed with saying you feel like killing Jews are you?

Killing innocent people like that is never acceptable. That's obvious. As for the rest that's your assumption. Personally all I saw when I read that was a very poor attempt at humour (funnily enough like the very sort of distasteful stuff you'd find on the cover of Charlie Hebdo).

For me personally there was never any real threat on his part, which for me is also the crux of the issue: criminal proceedings should be reserved for crimes they can either prove have happened or will happen. Most of the rest is little better than trying to prosecute thought crime.

Re: Without even a hint of irony

In the UK the second would be considered hate speech, the first is legally fine. I can understand and agree with this distinction.

It still means you do not have freedom of speech and so should stop pretending as a nation that you do. Cameron is essentially saying feel free to draw pictures of someone's imaginary friend even if it upsets a few staunch pretendy friendy types but don't upset the Jews. That is not freedom. The UK simply has freedom of speech as long as that speech is approved. That is a dangerous precedent. You do not need a hate speech law if you have one that outlaws incitement to commit a crime. I don't believe it would fall under that one.

Re: Without even a hint of irony

There's certainly a distinction, but (quite apart from your being wrong on hate crimes) it may be the opposite of what you think. You mention two religions, let's add weight by throwing in my own religion, Christianity, as well. In all three religions killing Jews (or anyone else) is prohibited absolutely as a sin against God. So is drawing a picture of the Prophet. These could even be regarded as equally sinful, as both are prohibited in precisely the same place: the Ten Commandments (for the picture, see Exodus 20:4).

So the true equation, with saying threatening, abusive or insulting things about killing Jews, would be saying threatening, abusive or insulting things in respect of drawing a picture of the Prophet. Which, I trust, was not your intention? English domestic law likely would regard both as hate crimes contrary to various sections (eg 4, 4A, 5, 19) Public Order Act 1986 as amended - saved only by the European Convention on Human Rights, as in Percy v DPP.

Since he wasn't born American, he couldn't take the job even if elected, and being a Green/Alliance (read: far-left by European standards) politician he'd net less than 0.5% of the votes even without that obstacle.

But run? Absolutely, you just have to talk him into it, then get him nominated in each state. (Come to think of it, I don't know if you even need the candidate's consent to nominate them. Probably varies between states.)

In what possible way could sharing the data on aircraft passengers have helped thwart the Charlie Hebdo killings? The perpetrators were (as I understand it) Parisian residents, and already known to the Police.

In the same way, the killing of Lee Rigby was done by UK residents known to the police, and the Canadian attacks were the same, carried out in each case by Canadian nationals.

In none of the above cases could data about air travel have had any bearing on the identification or capture of the attackers.

Nor could defeating encryption on the Internet (UK's proposal) as they were already known to security services or re-introducing passport checks for frontiers inside the Schengen area (Spain's proposal) as they were resident citizens.

Anyone would think the three countries have cynically used a terrorist attack just to push their own pet agendas. None of the three proposals address home-grown terrorism and, in the UK's and France's case, their security services keeping tabs on too many people and as a result deciding to stop monitoring the very people who later turned out to perpetrate the attacks.

>In what possible way could sharing the data on aircraft passengers have helped thwart the Charlie Hebdo killings?

Because it would have set a precendent for checks on road and rail links and requiring internal passports to travel to different regions. Then Paris could be kept for nice white French people and the Pieds Noir kept to the south - although without the confederate flags.

In what possible way could sharing the data on aircraft passengers have helped thwart the Charlie Hebdo killings?

It wouldn't, but that isn't the point of the game. The point of the game is to get more power whilst pretending to offer more/greater security. The power is then used to control the population and prevent dissent. As a politician you just hope the majority of the utterly useless media that indulge in AP re-posts rather than journalism don't question the fact that your intrusive data gathering has prevented nothing and the majority of perpetrators were all already known to you. Control the media and you get to control the majority of the public that are busy suckling on the welfare state teat who are more interested in shite like black Friday sales where they can purchase knock-down priced tat.

Lets not let

the actual facts get in the way of the "idea" that monitoring every aspect of our lives would have prevented this. As others have already said, these fuckers (Hedbo, Rigby) were already known to be potential nutters and the powers that be sat on their arses.

Its like having a small fault on your car that the garage cant be arsed to diagnose. "Wait for it to blow up mate, then we know what part was fucked"...

Quote this

Anytime this shite come up.

" “Far-reaching data collection in France would not have prevented the odious attacks in Paris. As with previous attacks, the perpetrators of the Paris attacks were already known to security authorities and had been the subject of investigations and supervision measures.

"Instead of creating an ineffective dragnet on all air passengers, security authorities should have been exchanging the data they already had on these suspects,”

Re: Quote this

Instead of creating an ineffective dragnet on all air passengers, security authorities should have been exchanging the data they already had on these suspects.

Rather than back off, I have heard calls to double down in order to create an effective dragnet. Surveillance is manpower-intensive, so obviously more money is needed in the budget in order to have more people pouring over the information gathered on everyone... I think we can figure out why this might not be a good plan.

Playing into Terrorists hands...

The way that monitoring airline passengers is "playing into the hands of terrorists' is that any curtailment of "freedom" that is the result of anti-terror legislation means that terrorism works.

I personally don't see the monitoring of airline passengers to be an issue. There IS a modicum of sense in knowing where anyone has been recently. No fly lists have a good reason for use.

Flying in and out of Yemen or Syria or any supect country likely puts you in the position of greater probability thus more inspection is warranted. Having a valid passport and not being on the "No Fly" list is an Al Qaeda recruiters dream.

Re: Playing into Terrorists hands...

Indeed .. every time that the politicians have a knee jerk reaction and keep hacking at our freedom and liberty , the terrorists win.

Ignore them totally , giving credits to terrorists for actions like at Charlie makes them more popular.

We have to ignore these people and let secret services handle them the only way that works.

Bomb the shit out of them . In fact .. i'd go one step further .. Make the actions of the secret services even more atrocious than the terrorists's , play their game and start paying them back with interest .. if they see savagery and feel and experience worse violence than their own , maybe they will think twice before attacking again .. I do not see how else we'll ever be left in peace. Reasoning wont work with them .

Re: Playing into Terrorists hands...

Re: Playing into Terrorists hands...

"Bomb the shit out of them . In fact .. i'd go one step further .. Make the actions of the secret services even more atrocious than the terrorists's"

Yeah, because there's nothing that's quite as a terrorism recruiting tool as someone seeing his wife and kids blown to pieces from a passing F15 for no good reason other than "they looked suspicious" and then being vilified for daring to speak out against it.

If the gloves were off and the secret services were allowed to go after the people training and funding the terorrists it would be awkward because:

Re: Playing into Terrorists hands...

Face it. You win a modern war only when you scare your enemy so much he loses any will to react. Nazi German underwent that treatment. People saw their dears die under the bombs. They also understood there would be more bombs and deaths if they didn't surrender.

It's no longer the "king wars" where a field battle was enough to understand who won and who loses. Today war needs to be total, and is won only when the enemy lose any will to combat longer, despite its losses.

Re: Playing into Terrorists hands...

"Face it. You win a modern war only when you scare your enemy so much he loses any will to react. Nazi German underwent that treatment. People saw their dears die under the bombs. They also understood there would be more bombs and deaths if they didn't surrender."

"It's no longer the "king wars" where a field battle was enough to understand who won and who loses. Today war needs to be total, and is won only when the enemy lose any will to combat longer, despite its losses."

--------------

Have you heard of this thing called The Blitz? German bombers carpet bombed London and other cities. That didn't exactly cause Britain to throw in the towel, now did it?

And bombing didn't cause Germany to surrender either. It was Soviet tanks rolling through Berlin that did that.

Re: Playing into Terrorists hands...

In fact .. i'd go one step further .. Make the actions of the secret services even more atrocious than the terrorists's , play their game and start paying them back with interest ..

That is exactly what groups like Al Queda want to happen. Today they're just extremists, with a few supporters organised here and there. Start bombing the shit out of anyone or anything connected with them would be the best recruiting drive for them that you can imagine.

The usual comparison is to think what would have happened if the UK government response to IRA bombs in London in the 70's had been to drop a few kilotons of HE on W. Belfast and Dublin. Do you seriously think we'd have reached even the fragile level of understanding and peaceful cooperation we have today?

Indeed, a more pertinent actual example might be the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising. The 'rebels' had very little support, until the government put the leaders in front of a firing squad, with Connolly shot while tied to a chair because he was too injured to stand. The election shortly afterwards was a landslide victory for Sinn Féin and independence.

Re: Playing into Terrorists hands...

Believe it or not, you're not the first person to think "escalating the violence" is the answer to terrorism.

Among others who've tried it in the recent past: the Russians (in Chechnya), the Syrians, the Israelis, Papua New Guinea (in Bougainville), the Libyans...

At best (Israel) it's reasonably contained and you just get an ongoing war. At worst (Syria, Libya), you get anarchy. Somewhere in the middle is an option where you just plain lose (Bougainville, Chechnya). Strangely enough, the brutal murder, rape and maiming of large swathes of civilian population - doesn't render the survivors docile and friendly. Who'd've thunk.

Re: re: those Germans

Any Excuse By Governments

Theresa May must have been jumping around her living rrom wooting for joy when France was attacked, now she and the rest of Camoron's poddles can use is an excuse to allow security services do whatever they like !

I hope the politicians (I won't call them 'leaders') will think first.

I'm old fashioned I guess because I truly believe in Franklin's: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. " and all of it's variants.

"Please, give me your data so I don't have to work to collect them myself"

It's hard to believe law enforcement agency when they want passenger data. Especially when those passenger to live one country and enter another are forced to pass through customs and passport checks. Why law enforcement data can't collect those data there, instead of asking a commercial companies to give away all their passengers data? Because this way is easier and the average cop doesn't have to work too much in his or her airport booth?

A few years ago at Istanbul airport there were five officers in the passport check gate I was going through. One was checking passports, the other four just wasting time. Queues, because many booths were closed.

Now passports are machine readable, thereby gathering data about people transiting is not that difficult, it they really want them. But they want them, without any effort to gather them. And this laziness just mean they want to collect those data just to justify themselves after an event. Because they won't be able to use them efficiently to prevent anything. Too much data means too much noise too, and even if they have "big data" experts is yet to see if they can extract useful info in time...

ISIS needs to hire a PR flack

Wow, talk about thin skinned, these ISIS peckerheads sure are easy to draw into a PR disaster. While the left and it's fawning press soft pedals Islam as some sort of anti-capitalist vanguard, ISLAM does the right wing's work for it.

Let's have some fun. Let's imagine that the American Tea Party cut off the heads of daughters refusing arranged marriage, stoned to death anyone calling a TV evangelist a con artist, punished with 1000 lashes anyone saying that Jesus may not have walked on water, cut off the hand of a street person caught pilfering a loaf of bread, etc., etc., etc. ETC., ETC., ETC.

I'm of the considered, adjudged and temperate opinion that you'd see blood, bile and snot coming out of the eyes of the Occupy confraternity and its many clandestine pom pom shakers. The irony of the leftist satire 'zine in question falling victim to a presumed ally in bringing Utopia to planet Earth, rises to the heavens like burning copal in an Aztec dawn. I'm barely able to contain my snickering contemptuous mirth.

Re: ISIS needs to hire a PR flack

You didn't even read what I wrote, but let the last line wrench your rudder from your hands.

The world has an international press that refuses to acknowledge that radical Islam is a pox upon humanity because as agents of a spent and antiquated Soviet Union foreign policy, still somewhat in place, they have got in bed with the inhuman horror show of ISIS et al, their hatred of women, their throwback medieval attitudes towards pretty much everything, including freedom of speech, in the name of a Frankenstein meme that needs to be killed if you are to enjoy the volitional pursuits of your life and liberty. It is your refusal to see what sits in front of your face that is disgusting.

Tell me this analysis is wrong- If the right wing of any country performed any act of brutality performed by ISIS & Co., there would be utter shite to pay in the media and you know it. The fact that you cannot admit it to your mirror image is symptomatic of the schizophrenia that has infected otherwise well meaning humans. Go to YouTube right now and watch some of the insane atrocities committed willingly before video cameras depicting any manner of beheading. Find the one where the victim's throat and windpipe are cut, but the spine is left intact so that the poor bugger consciously gurgles and gags a fountain of blood through his last breaths over a period of 20 seconds, before hes head is finally severed, all in living color and surround sound. You probably recoil in horror at movies of bulldozers scraping Bergen-Belsen Jews into open pits by the hundreds. You are simply miffed that this is not a polite critique, that I use language to match the case.

Yah, watching leftists trying to reconcile their schizophrenic tolerance of Islam with the actual fact of Islam is a hoot. Insanity is ugly. Political clowns painting it in gay pastels will make any rational human feel superior. It's a dark Heironymous Bosch panorama out there son, get used to it.

Re: ISIS needs to hire a PR flack

Oh, I read what you wrote. I just can't believe that you're not trolling, you really believe this drivel.

First, to your "analysis" (and may I say, seldom have I seen the first four letters of that word so richly earned, so kudos there). You are aware, I presume, that "radical Islam", together with its close relative "pan-Arab nationalism", was deliberately cultivated as a tool of foreign policy, first by the British during World War One, and later by the Americans in the pursuit of cheap oil? That during the 1980s, the CIA was arming the Taliban and the Reagan administration was helping to develop the Iranian arms industry? That George H W Bush and Bill Clinton both fostered the growth of radical Sunni factions in Iraq, with the aim of weakening Saddam and to counter the regional influence of Iran? To characterise these same people as "agents of... Soviet foreign policy" is pure deflection.

Second, exactly how much "leftist media" are you watching? Because the sources I see spend quite a bit of time talking about how horrible ISIS is. The idea that somehow the libruls are turning a blind eye to Islamist atrocities is purely a product of whatever meth-addled hallucinations you've been watching on whatever deranged media channel you do subscribe to - it's simply not borne out by anything in objective reality.

Yes, I daresay the BBC would get itself quite in a tizzy if, say, some deranged right-winger massacred several dozen schoolchildren at a camp in Norway. (I'm not sure what you're trying to convey with "utter shite to pay in the media", but there were certainly some strongly worded opinions on the subject. Are you trying to imply that there shouldn't be, that we should all be like, "meh, whatever" to these things?) But to imply that they don't talk about atrocities committed by muslims because they're somehow "in bed with" the latter - is quite simply, not something that could be said, with a straight face, by anyone who's been paying the slightest attention.

As to "the actual fact of Islam": yes, there are muslims who do terrible things, and we see them on the news. There are also non-muslims who do things just as terrible, and we see them on the news too, but for some reason less attention gets paid to their religion. (You know that, between 1980 and 2005, there were more terrorist attacks on US soil perpetrated by Jewish extremists than by Muslims, right? And both of these put together are hugely outweighed by the contributions of Catholic (mostly Latino - Puerto Rican, Cuban) factional groups.)

And there are the muslims I work with every day, who are generally above-average in terms of courtesy and conscientiousness, if not necessarily in intelligence. So which group should I judge? The ones I'm happy to have working beside me, or the ones the media, in its ever-more-frantic attempt to capture and hold my eyeballs, thinks I'm more likely to watch?

Not everyone who disagrees with you is motivated by political correctness (whatever that even means) or "leftist ideology". Some of us just resent being played for suckers by the military-intelligence-policing-industrial complex.

Re: ISIS needs to hire a PR flack

What fools

There is absolutely nothing unreasonable about monitoring all airline passengers. It's the best chance to deter suicide bombers and it doesn't impose any unreasonable invasion of privacy. If you disagree - take the bus. I can't get out of an airplane at 30,000 feet when some terrorists decides it's time to go meet his 21 virgins thus higher security is reasonable and prudent. No one is being forced to fly. If you don't like the new rules, flying is not in your future.

BTW the reason the authorities want the data from the airlines is so that they know as much as possible about the passengers before terrorists or other crims board the plane, not three minutes before they get on the plane and 20 minutes after the plane is in the air. Many a crim has gotten through security without getting caught because the authorities were minutes late to find out.

Re: What fools

Even buses, metros and trains can be attacked by suicide bombers. It happened in Madrid and London. Why don't they ask for those passengers lists? No fly lists already exist to protect flights, they work the other way round. It's police giving airlines a list of 'dangerous' passenger. Now they want airlines submit the list of *all* passenger including also additional data like credit card numbers, meal preferences, etc. The usual dragnet attempt to hide lack of proper intelligence (in every meaning of it), and pretend something is done, while collecting a lot of sensitive data about *everybody* and keeping the for years. It's more dangerous than terrorism itself.

Other Forms of Transport are Available

Terror

The point of Terror is terror, it has no real core beliefs. It is not religious except in the way of being a death cult, Islam or Christianity is just a figleaf..

Done well it causes a response from governments that usually involves greater attempts at control, of the populace as it is a great justification for the control freaks in power. The fact that this fails to control the terrorists is immaterial. Some people in goverment will always espose the need for greater control, and knee-jerk measures.

The end game of this is that it splits the goverment from the governed and may even align the governed with the terrorist thus justifying all the control measures. So the terroist wins.

They only way to win against this sort of thing is not to play their game

Nothing to see here. This is old news with new legs - the UK govt had this at the heart of bids to various consortia who were chasing the E-borders contracts up to 10 years ago. At that time, consultants 'imagined' of intelligent gates at airports that would look for matches in travel 'manifests' created when people booked their travel though a regulated travel agent (so a fail with the 'regulated' for anyone who didn't want to be 'regulated').

The idea being that between boarding pass swipe and 'wheels up' on the plane, the local authorities would have the opportunity to call back a plane from push-back, taxi or take-off pattern and collar the suspects. Failing that, the Interkops could warn the destination endpoint of the arrival of shady said individual and so present them back to the authorities.

Of course, that's come to nothing owing to the massive costs, but still send the heart a-flutter when there's a disturbance in the force like said events in Paris this week. And it would have helped if the ID of the lucky lady that got away was tagged to such a system.